Satya Nadella — Microsoft’s AGI plan & quantum breakthrough

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:00)
Satya, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. So, just in a second, we're going to get to the two breakthroughs that Microsoft has just made, and congratulations, same day in nature. Myorana Zero chip, which we have in front of us right here, and also the world human action models. But can we just continue the conversation we were having a second ago? So, you're describing the ways in which the things you were seeing in the 80s and 90s, you're seeing them happen again.

**Satya Nadella** (0:24)
Yeah, I mean, the thing that is exciting for me, Dwarkesh, first of all, it's fantastic to be on your podcast. I'm a big listener and it's just fun to be, and I love the way that you do these interviews and the broad topics that you explore. It's sort of, to me, it reminds me a little bit of my, I would say, first few years even in the tech industry starting in the 90s, where there was real debate about whether it's gonna be RISC or CISC, or hey, are we really gonna be able to build servers using even x86, or when I joined Microsoft, that was in the beginning of what was Windows NT. So everything from the core silicon platform to the operating system to the app tier, that full stack approach, the entire thing is being litigated, and that's, I think, perhaps, you could say cloud did a bunch of that, and obviously distributed computing, and cloud did change client server, the web changed massively, but this does feel a little more, like maybe more full stack than even the past, that at least I've been involved in.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (1:41)
When you think about what actually, which decisions ended up being the long-term winners in the 80s and 90s, and which ones didn't, and especially when you think about, you were at Sun Microsystems, they had an interesting experience with the 90s.com bubble. People talk about this data center build out as being a bubble, but at the same time, we have the Internet today as a result of what was built out then. What are the lessons about what will stand the test of time? What is an inherent secular trend? What is just ephemeral? What stands out? It's interesting.

**Satya Nadella** (2:10)
I think if I go back even at least the four big transformations that I've been part of, if you say the client and the client server, so that's the birth of the graphical user interface and the x86 architecture basically even allowing us to build servers.
It was very clear to me. I remember going to what was PDC in 91 In fact, I was at Sun at that time. In 91, I went to Moscone. Basically, that's when Microsoft first described Win32 interface. I said it was pretty clear to me what was going to happen, where the server was also going to be an x86 thing. When you have the scale advantages accruing to something, that's the secular bet you have to place. What happened in the client was going to happen on the server side, and then you were able to then actually build client-server applications, so the app model, and it became clear. Then the web was the big thing for us, which we had to deal with in starting. In fact, as soon as I joined Microsoft, I think, what is it? Like the browser, the Netscape browser, or the Mosaic browser came out what? December, November of 93, right? I think is when Andreessen and Krew sort of had that. And so that was a big game changer. I mean, an interesting way, just as we were getting going on, what was the client-server wave, and it was clear that we were going to win it as well. We had the browser moment, and so we had to adjust. And we did a pretty good job of adjusting to it, right? Because the browser was a new, I'd say, app model.
And we were able to embrace it with everything we did, right? Whether it was HTML in Word, or build a new thing called the browser ourselves, and compete for it, and then build a web server on our server stack, and sort of go after it. Except, of course, we missed what turned out to be the biggest business model on the web, because we all assume the web is all about being going to be distributed. Who would have thought that search would be the biggest winner in organizing the web? So that's where we obviously didn't see it, and Google saw it, and executed super well. So that's one lesson learned for me is like, hey, you got to really not only get the tech trend right, you also have to get where is the value going to be created with that trend. And these business model shifts are probably tougher than even the tech trend changes.